What Is SEO

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is a technique that improves a websites position in the organic search engine rankings.

A user types a keyword or series of keywords into a search engine and the search engine will then return a list of millions of results relating to the keyword query.

Websites that appear at the top of a search engines results will receive far more visitors than if ranked lower down.

Organic Rankings Vs Paid Rankings

There are two different ways for your website to appear in a search engine. One is through organic rankings (highlighted in green) and the other is through paid results (highlighted in red).

With paid results Google will feature your ad as a highlighted listing on the first page with a small ‘Ad’ wording next to the results, this is paid for on a pay per click (PPC) basis. Organic rankings are the listings you see on the main part of a search engines results page which are achieved through a number of SEO techniques, including optimising your website and quality linking. The search engine will look at these elements and rank your site for specific keyphrases that it thinks your website is most relevant for. They are called organic because they appear ‘naturally’ in the search results and are not paid for.

Both organic and paid listings achieve different results. Organic rankings are easy to maintain whereas once you stop paying for PPC, your listings are removed. Organic listings also receive over 90% of all click throughs on a results page, so you’ll get far more people clicking through to your website than you would with paid listings.

What’s In An Organic Ranking?

Users usually only click on the top 3 organic search results because they think that they most relate to their query. By ranking in one of these top three spots, your website will receive 58.4% of clicks from the results page.

A number one organic ranking will receive a CTR (click-through rate) of 36.4%, a number two ranking has a CTR of 12.5% and number three has a CTR of 9.5%. Appearing in Google’s number one position will give you the same amount of traffic as it would if your site was ranked in the second, third, fourth and fifth position combined.

When you hear people relating to the term ‘traffic’ they are referring to the number of visitors your website receives, so the higher you rank in search results, the more traffic you will receive.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a very important part of SEO and should be the very first thing that is carried out as part of the process, after-all what is the point in targeting phrases that no one searches for?!

SEO-i carry out extensive keyphrase research to work out which are the best keyphrases to target relating to your business. We make sure that we focus only on phrases that a lot of people search for and that are related to your site, thus ensuring you receive targeted traffic.

Why do some websites rank better than others? This is because they are the most relevant to the users search query and have usually had SEO work carried out, pushing them further up the rankings.

Search Engine Market Share

As of March 2019, Google has achieved a massive 92.46% of the search engine market share whilst Bing receives 2.45%, Yahoo 1.82% and others achieving only 3.27% of the search market.

Google is certainly the search giant when it comes to the search wars, which is why we focus mainly on getting good rankings in Google. By optimising your website along with Google’s guidelines, you’ll find that the smaller search engines will also rank your website.

So if you want to get to the top of Google’s search results, the best approach is to pick an SEO company like us, that knows exactly what to do.

Are people struggling to find your website or do you simply want more visitors? SEO-i is here to help. Our affordable packages are put together to suit every type of businesses needs, whether big or small, e-commerce or information only, we can help you get results.